Finance (No. 2) Bill

Andrew Jones Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee of the Whole House (Day 2)
Tuesday 20th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

I rise to speak to new clause 30 in the name of the Leader of the Opposition and to make a few remarks on the other provisions in this group.

Clauses 92 and 93 relate to the temporary VAT cuts for the tourism and hospitality sectors. These are of course among the hardest-hit sectors of our economy over the past year, and it is absolutely right that this relief is extended. Only today we learned that, of the 800,000 jobs lost in the economy over the past year, 80% are those of people under 35 years old, many of whom previously worked in the tourism and hospitality sectors. Today’s unemployment figures show that it is young people more than any others who have borne the brunt of the job loss impact over the past year.

The vaccine programme of course gives us great hope and a platform for the cautious reopening of the economy, but only two in five hospitality businesses have outside space. Most of them are still not able to operate even under the conditions allowed at the time of this debate, so it is still a very tough time for the hospitality industry. After the experience of the past year, with the upsurges in cases in some countries, the emergence of new variants and vaccine resistance levels remaining uncertain, no one would yet say that we were out of the woods or that there was not still a need to support key sectors of the economy for some time yet. That is why it is right to continue the measures in clauses 92 and 93.

Clause 95 relates to payment schedules for VAT. Again, it is important to show some understanding of the difficulties that businesses have faced in the past year, and it is far better to have a measure that approves a realistic repayment schedule than bring support to an abrupt end and cause repayments at a defined deadline, which could have very damaging consequences for some of the businesses concerned.

Clause 97 and schedule 19 relate to steel moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We of course support anything that will make life easier for the steel industry right now. It is the foundation for much of our manufacturing industry, and there is a great deal of uncertainty hanging over various steel plants in the UK right now. It is impossible not to reflect that, while the Government promised us free trade with the rest of the world, we need a clause and a schedule like these precisely because they have not even been able to guarantee free trade within the UK. We hope that this clause and schedule will make it easier to move steel goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but the Minister will be aware that one of the broader uncertainties surrounding UK-made steel is how to avoid its being subject to 25% EU tariffs if quotas are breached in the near future. I wonder whether he will update the House on how discussions on that matter are going and how the Government intend to avoid that. This is particularly important given the wider issues facing the steel industry at the moment.

New clause 30, in the name of the Leader of the Opposition, relates to the transition from LIBOR to other reference rates, and specifically to reviewing the effects on taxation of replacing LIBOR. The new clause would require such a review to take into account the implications for tax revenues of the transition, and the effects on businesses, including those offering supply chain finance.

The new clause relates to clauses 128 and 129, which replace references to LIBOR in legislation with references to an “incremental borrowing rate”. The history of this, of course, relates to the long effort to move away from the use of LIBOR in financial markets. The need to do so arose out of the uncovering of attempts to rig LIBOR in the interests of various individuals in the financial services industry some years ago. Indeed, I believe that the Minister and I were colleagues on the Treasury Committee when all that was uncovered.

The uncovering of those practices exposed much that was bad about what was happening in parts of financial trading at the time, with activity being pursued in the interests of traders rather than customers, rates being rigged for the benefit of those traders and their institutions, and bank chief executives professing ignorance about what was going on inside their own companies. The ability to game the rate was exposed; the use of opinions on cost from submitters to the rate-setting process, rather than its always being based on actual trades, produced the possibility that tiny movements in LIBOR could benefit individual institutions or traders, often by very significant sums given the volumes of trades involved. Potentially, only a tiny movement in rates was needed to generate a very big profit.

However, making a decision to move away from LIBOR to alternative benchmarks based on actual transactions rather than the opinion of traders was, in a sense, the easy part. So far it has taken years; no wonder they are calling it the long goodbye. The difficulty is that LIBOR has been so widely used as a benchmark for contracts around the world. Indeed, the Bank of England estimates that LIBOR has served to underpin contracts worth some £300 trillion across the world and £30 trillion here in the UK. Even in these covid days, those are serious sums.

Moving away from LIBOR without dealing with that contract issue leads to the potential for contractual law disputes. If a deal was agreed based on one interest rate, how will it be affected by the move to another rate? That is not an abstract or unreal problem; it could affect mortgage rates, leases of buildings—all sorts of contracts. Indeed, the issue was highlighted only this morning in the Financial Times, in a story headlined “US lawmakers warned of litigation chaos over Libor”.

The Government have attempted to deal with this legacy contract issue through the Financial Services Bill, which is currently ending its proceedings in the other place. How successful that legislative effort will be remains to be seen. The very least we can say is that the reality of moving away from LIBOR has proved to be more complex than the decision in principle to do so. We may not have heard the end of this matter of transitioning away from LIBOR. That is why it makes sense to have a review of the implications, which is exactly what our new clause 30 calls for.

Clauses 128 and 129 deal with the tax implications of this change and replace legislative references to LIBOR with the term “incremental borrowing rate”. They also provide the Government with powers to make tax changes as a result of the discontinuation of LIBOR.

The Government estimate that the impact of all this on Exchequer revenues will be marginal. That could be right, but the sheer volume of contracts involved here suggests that the need for a review of the implications for tax revenue is real, and that is what our new clause 30 calls for. We believe that such a review should take specific account of the impact on businesses using supply chain finance. After all, that has been very much in the news recently, and it ought to be a field with which Ministers are by now familiar. Perhaps the Minister felt special when he got the call about supply chain finance, because it is not every day that someone gets a call from the former Prime Minister, but now we find that he was not the only one. In fact, there were three Ministers in the Department, one in the Department of Health and Social Care and the industry adviser in No. 10, all of whom got the call about supply chain finance. You could be forgiven for thinking that there are few people living west of the Caucasus who have not heard from the former Prime Minister about supply chain finance. After all that, it seems only right to consider the impact of this provision and on these companies. That is why we have included them in the new clause.

The inquiries on the broader issue will do their work. We may well hear more of this elsewhere, but, for the moment, as regards new clause 30, I look forward to the Minister’s response at the end of the debate.

[Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), and it is a pleasure to speak in this debate. As I spoke twice yesterday and I am on the Bill Committee next week, I will keep my remarks a little short and focus on one measure that is important to my constituency.

I know that the Committee will appreciate that Harrogate and Knaresborough has a very significant hospitality and tourism sector. Using data from UKHospitality, we see that before the pandemic, there were 9,464 people employed by the sector. That puts us in the top 10% of constituencies across the country. The sector is not just a Harrogate and Knaresborough one; it is important to the whole of the York and North Yorkshire economy, accounting for over 75,000 jobs. If we look across the UK, we see that the sector accounts for 150,000 businesses and 2.4 million jobs. It is a huge number of people in a sector that has been one of the hardest hit.

As has been mentioned, among the tax measures in the Bill is the extension of the temporary VAT cut of 5% for the hospitality and tourism sectors. That reduction was first announced last July and was very well received by the industry, but this Bill extends that to the end of September and will then bring in a further reduction of a 12.5% rate for the six months to the end of March next year. This is very welcome, and the points that were made by both Front Benchers, my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury and the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East, were absolutely correct.

This initiative understands the pressures that businesses will face. The hospitality sector may be starting again but it is effectively running on empty, having had months of either zero or very limited trading. If I may quote a local businessman, Mr Ian Fozard of Rooster’s brewery and taproom—[Hon. Members: “Hear, Hear!”] Mr Fozard is obviously well known here. He said that

“most businesses like ours need a sustained period of good trading to build back some reserves”.

Mr Fozard’s business is an excellent one and he makes a significant point. The industry needs a period of stability where it can rebuild. One challenge will be when businesses have been through the summer and they face the standard seasonal reduction but may not have built up the cash flow in reserve to see them through the leaner months. This initiative recognises that risk, so the continuity of support through the winter is welcome.

The sector is incredibly varied. We tend to focus on—indeed, the publicity tends to be about—pubs and restaurants, but there are also hotels and guest houses, and in Harrogate, we have the convention centre, which is a significant driver of visitors to the area. It has been a Nightingale Hospital for the last few months and while that is being deconstructed, the convention centre team have launched their restart plans, and I know that their good work is seeing the diary filled with bookings. However, my point is that this is a business-to-business sector, not just a business-to-consumer sector and, as this sector is diverse, so, correspondingly, is its supply chain. It has been very tough for the businesses in that supply chain. I know that, in my own constituency, some businesses in the supply sector will not be reopening, and businesses that have served the industry well for many years are at a crisis point.

I am sure that the safe reopening will release some pent-up demand. There are clear signs of that this week: we have all seen the news coverage and probably seen it in our constituencies, too. However, we should not expect the return of volume international markets any time soon and there will be some domestic customers whose confidence will need rebuilding before they engage with the sector again. For the conference industry, there will be the challenge of knowing just how much of that market will stay online having gone online over the past year. So this is a sector facing huge challenges. It is a sector that clearly interests our constituents and Members here, and it is important for employment, particularly of younger people.